Steampunk Revolution

Monologues from the Industrial Revolution

﻿For my "choice"project I wanted to keep the original idea of presenting a monologue about our issue but with a little more freedom. We chose to have our group either perform their piece as a monologue or a dialogue with another person. We also had the freedom to make working machines that, again, represented our issue. My partner and I are very passionate about child labor and continuing the fight against it even though it is not a problem we face everyday. We aimed to create a powerful spoken word that educated our audience on the dangers and realities of child labor. What better way to do that than tell it from the perspective of a child laborer. We wanted to show our audience that even though this isn't obviously present in the United States, it is a problem that 168 million children suffer from daily. So without further ado here is out final monologue!

​​Our Pamphlet

​There were lots of things that we were unable to say in our monologue, so to make sure we really did our part to spread the word about the truth of child labor, we made a pamphlet to pass out to our audience.​

My Costume

To create our costumes we made characters that played a role in the Industrial Revolution and in the issue our project would be addressing. My character is an orphan girl who was put into child labor at the age of 8. She was adopted by a factory owner that used his power to exploit her labor. Now, 10 years later she helps children that were in her same situation find families.

Throughout the creation of our costumes, we revised and changed them many times. To the left is one of my many sketches at to how I wanted my costume to look, but it is very obvious that my final product wasn't super close to my sketches. I used many things that I already had at home to make my costume like a blouse, tights, boots, and shorts.

Our Machine

To have a well rounded project we needed to make sure that we had implemented something from each class. The monologue and pamphlet were a part of Humanities class, our costumes were from Art, but now we needed Physics so we decided to engineer a working machine that represented our issue. We chose to make a conveyer belt-like machine with the link arm children moving toward a capitalist so it looks like he is eating them. Below are pictures of our machine in different stages.